Being mindful of our specific news sources.

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@ DW_a_mom

Thank you for the long and detailed reply, I'm going to come back and nitpick a few things (I think you're being naive about social media, for example), but I appreciate the high effort response. As I mentioned in another post, I spend a ton of time on news and politics, often to the detriment of other things more important in my life, and even though I know full well that I'm the outlier who's doing something strange, it's really hard to turn off the "Jesus Christ, are any of you people actually paying attention?!?!?" reaction when I run across people parroting things I thought were laid to bed long ago. I might PM you some stuff about the Biden laptop later, the story there never was about the material itself (it sure looked like an attempted October Surprise, but no one really cared), but the way it was suppressed and swept under the rug, that concerns me a hell of a lot more than whatever the now President's shady son was up to in Ukraine.

I realize I should know you better than to think you would do anything but nit pick a response, but I wrote that at 3am my time, and I’d rather not know all the ways I might have embarrassed myself. Still, you might want to understand that there are some times I choose to be a little naive. It’s the only way to turn off the constant worry and fret our modern world wants to spin us into. Unless it’s a matter super essential to our future that I have actual power to change, I’d rather leave those areas be. If I don’t, I’ll end up digging into everything like a dog furiously after a bone and I’ll never get anything done that I actually need to. It’s just impossible to worry or care or try to figure out everything, so we all have tales we’ll let ourselves believe. I’m not unaware I make that choice.

With all the anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists, MAGA-hatters, QAnon followers, and Trumpsters out there, it pays to be intentionally naïve of all their lies.

@Dox47 I may remember the posts you were thinking of with Biden v Trump but I will have to figure out what thread they are in. If I’m thinking of the right posts, the gist for me is that often politicians are boxed in by the cumulative history accrued before they took office. I don’t believe there is any good way to withdraw troops from an unstable country. I’ve read the outline of errors, but haven’t found suggestions of what alternatives might have gone better, although I am sure the military will do a thorough postmortem to help in the future. It’s in the complex box, for me, that requires withholding judgement until the eye of history can give a more thorough perspective. I honestly don’t know who to blame, but jumping to Biden alone is superficial.

I also didn’t detail some of statements made about Trump’s relationships with constituents that may seem inconsistent. The short of it is distinctly different constituent groups were at play in setting different sentences.

Finally, social media. We have a huge amount of reckoning and analysis to do as a country when it comes to politicians using social media, and I have not heard any suggestions from anyone that don’t have huge downsides. Until we reach an actionable place, it’s more a cross your fingers and hope for the best issue to me. I don’t see much point in launching criticism without solutions.

In no way was it a criticism.
It was merely an observation and an implied explanation as to why I may not respond, as I previously explicitly mentioned.
And my dyslexia is my own problem, not yours.

Some people simply choose to misrepresent others' intentions.
This is a big problem in these here parts, pardner.

Last edited by Pepe on 23 Aug 2021, 6:16 pm, edited 3 times in total.

I actually get it, my mother is much the same in that she's happier not knowing the more cynical reasons behind a lot of things, but that desire not to know becomes a problem when it conflicts with a discussion where the facts are in dispute.

My preference is to sort out the wheat from the chaff, using my own experiences and critical thinking skills.
I'd rather be enlightened than not.

Based on what you have said, I think it is safe to say I am not your mother.

Since I am The Oracle of Truth, it is my job to search for it, no matter where it may lay.
However,
At times, I am happy to sit on the fence until more facts are unearthed.

The important thing is to keep an open mind.

Tell me about it.

It used to frustrate me when people engage in groupthink and merely follow whatever their brand of politics dictates.
These days I tend to simply point at them and have a belly laugh.

It used to gobsmack me when people jumped to conclusions, servicing their own internal bias' without waiting for the facts to come in.
These days I tend to eat popcorn until the dust settles.

Popcorn, anyone?

I think I was taken aback by the fact the laptop was still being talked about. I should have followed my first instinct to fully stay out of it, but I started to worry I had missed something important. Silly of me, since I’ve yet to see anything that affirms that worry (although I do still plan to eventually go back and refresh on our privacy laws; that is something I need to make sure I'm remembering correctly). There are times we need to know the cynical reasons in order to make wise decisions, and times we don’t. I do try to be pragmatic.

We mom’s get to a certain age and learn not to sweat stuff we can’t do anything at all about. Hard enough to deal with the things we can affect.

Last edited by DW_a_mom on 23 Aug 2021, 8:25 pm, edited 3 times in total.

Pretty much sums up how I felt watching the reality TV show otherwise known as the Trump presidency, and his actions since the election.

Not to bring anyone back into a debate.

Although I do really enjoy freshly made popcorn.

OK, you've said now a few times that you've looked into it, what did you find that convinced you that there's nothing there, and what's your alternative theory of what happened? To keep this on topic, I'm trying to investigate how someone else might look at the same story and draw different conclusions, as I think "shady dude left a laptop at a shop" is much more likely than "shadowy conspiracy manufactures a giant archive of meticulously assembled fake emails and photos as a dirty trick but doesn't directly implicated Joe Biden" as a story. More importantly, what about this story justified suppressing it on social media to the point of locking the account of one of the largest papers in the country without any evidence either way?

I looked into when it broke, and, as I’ve pointed out a few times, no longer recall what the convincing points were. I’ll let you know if I find them again.

If there was suppression, I would agree that would be the bigger story. But I just can’t get myself to believe that any of it, in this one situation, matters.

Wait, do you not remember that Facebook and Twitter actively suppressed this story, even blocking it in private messages? There's no question at all there was suppression, Jack Dorsey even expressed some contrition after the fact, the only question is why, and it's not even much of a question given the political attitudes of the companies involved.

Dorsey admitting the blocking was a mistake
https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter ... ng-2020-10

An article on the Facebook suppression:
https://www.newsweek.com/facebooks-effo ... ps-1539954

Notice the double standard, no scrutiny at all to the hacked Trump tax returns, but this story that might have damaged Biden had to be stopped until it could be "fact checked", or because it violated a previously undisclosed standard. Seriously, do you really not remember this? Again, forget if you think it's important or not whether the son of a presidential candidate might have been involved in political corruption potentially involving his father, this was a pretty blatant thumb on the scale from the people who control a significant chunk of what amounts to reality these days, which went hand in glove with mainstream outlets pointedly refusing to cover the story or the coverup.

Here's an account of what went on, with many links to the mainstream media attempting to spin this story rather than covering it:

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house ... liction-of

It contains this maddening exchange between Trump and an anchor:



Does that sound like someone who's interested in finding out what actually happened, or someone desperately trying to ignore a story they don't want to tell?

You know how I pick who I trust? They need to really piss me off a good 30% of the time in a way that I can't really pin down, because that's what being told something that you know is true but don't want to acknowledge feels like, if I agree with someone all the time it's not news, it's entertainment.

Well, as I recall, I did state "It gets a little "political" at times, but also contains various legal\law related details" - I did recognise the bias in the discussion, but as stated, was providing it for the "various legal\law related details" (such as previous cases, etc.).

If you focussed on the bias, rather than what was contained in the sections where "opinion"\bias didn't come into the discussion (such as prior cases, court's handling of "abandoned" private information, etc.) that was your choice, but in no way suggests that I didn't see as much bias as you did in it.

@Dox47 Unfortunately, I have a horrible memory. What I need to know for my job I’ve got down lock solid, but it’s a crap shoot as to what I’ll remember of almost anything else, and it gets worse each year as I age.

What I definitely do remember is leaving the election season with immense unease at having private companies be in charge of what is deemed factual and what isn’t, what can be said with respect to political issues on their platforms and what cannot, on top of all the “fun” algorithms they use to filter what we see. Someone needs to apply a standard, but the current situation doesn’t feel sustainable. I don’t know the answer, what the “better way” would look like. I’m not into expressing outrage without having a viable alternative to put forth.